insistence on detail proved an advantage. I shall always regard Brown as a man carried by a youthful enthusiasm for art out of his true occupation, which was history; for his literary and scientific tendencies and his vehement love of truth were the larger part of his mind, and these qualities are of secondary importance in art. He sympathized strongly with the early phase of the pre-Raphaelite movement, which was what he had attempted with less intensity himself; but when Rossetti entered upon his true artistic development, it was only the personal influence of the past that gave the elder painter any power of influencing the younger. It is possible that Rossetti owed something of his manner of painting--a fragmentary method of completion--to the teaching of Brown; if so, he was indebted to his friend for the weakest side of his art. But, for the rest, this system of working is very general amongst English painters, in whom the amateur is persistent--the building the picture up in detail, with minor reference to the mass of the structure; and this was the weakness of Brown's art, for what he did was done with such intensity that no after treatment could bring it into complete subordination to the general effect. Theodore Rousseau's maxim, "If you have not got your picture in the first five lines you will never get it," seems to me the true golden rule of the art of painting, as in all creation. A picture should grow _pari passu_ in all its parts; otherwise there is no certainty of its keeping together when finished. Rossetti's influence, though always partial and never leaving a genuine pupil, was very wide, in the end, it seems to me, much exceeding that of Millais and that of Holman Hunt; but it is a question in which of his two functions--poet or painter--it was most effective. I have heard Swinburne say that but for Rossetti's early poetry he would never have written verses, but this I think must be taken conditionally. Swinburne has the poetic temperament so decided and so individual, and his musical quality is so exalted, that it was impossible that he should not have shown it at some time; but it is possible that Rossetti furnished the spark that actually kindled the fire. Perhaps Swinburne himself cannot trace the vein to its hidden sources, and confounded the mastery of Rossetti's temperament and the personal magnetism he exercised on those who came into close relations with him with an intellectual stimulus which, strictly speaking, Rossetti did not exercise. He was too specialized, too exclusively artistic in all his developments, to carry much intellectual weight, and Swinburne was more fully developed in the purely intellectual man; but the warmest friendship existed between them. I often saw Swinburne at Cheyne Walk, and, when they were together, the painter's was certainly the dominant personality, to which Swinburne's attitude was that of an affectionate younger brother.